WARFIGHTING: JOHN BOYD’S THEORY OF CONFLICT, THE ORIGINS OF MANEUVER WARFARE, AND THE COMPLEX PROCESS OF DOCTRINAL CHANGE IN THE U.S. MARINE CORPS, 1975-1989

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the origins of the American concept of maneuver warfare and the process through which that concept was first encoded as military doctrine in 1989 by the U.S. Marine Corps in Fleet Marine Force Manual 1 (FMFM 1), Warfighting. Examining the process through which these ideas were incepted, matured, and encoded in doctrine makes it clear that the prevailing narrative is deficient in several important ways, and these misconceptions obstruct an accurate understanding of what maneuver warfare is and how military organizations deal with radical new ideas.

A detailed examination of the ideas advanced by John Boyd, the man commonly thought to be the creator of maneuver warfare based upon his Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (OODA) Cycle theory, shows that neither of those concepts was ever his central argument. Rather, Boyd was developing a much more expansive theory of competition and conflict, and his method and ideas are widely misunderstood. It was a military reform colleague of Boyd’s named William S. Lind who originated the concept of maneuver warfare based on his own interpretation of German military history. He promoted this style of fighting through a dichotomous model contrasting it with firepower/attrition warfare in an effort to help the U.S. Army understand how it needed to change its approach to warfare. Ultimately, Lind’s ideas about maneuver warfare found better reception within the U.S. Marine Corps, where he worked with Marines in several different organizations to further develop the concept. The way that Lind incorporated Boyd’s early ideas to promote maneuver warfare has much to do with why Boyd’s role and theory are misunderstood today. The Marines who interacted with Lind, and to a lesser degree Boyd, meanwhile, played an important role in developing the supporting concepts and techniques needed to make maneuver warfare an actionable approach to war.

Efforts to incorporate the new ideas in Marine Corps doctrine were limited less by simple institutional conservatism than they were by the inability of the service’s bureaucracy to incorporate fundamentally new concepts, which required a particular new, shared understanding of war. The most important achievement of FMFM 1 was not that it formally adopted maneuver warfare, but its definition of a common conception of war within which maneuver warfare made sense, emphasizing moral and mental factors, the inherent nonlinearity of warfare, and the fundamental uncertainty that surrounded military decision-making. This, defining a new way of thinking about war that all Marines would share, was the most significant accomplishment of FMFM 1. However, this accomplishment has been undercut by several misconceptions about maneuver warfare, all of which were byproducts of the process through which the concept was formed and promoted.